IIT Delhi’s all-women team offers new tool in fight against cancer

“The nanotechnology-based delivery system would be specifically useful for cancer patients because if the bacterial infection in cancer remains untreated, it can infect the host even after the cancer cells are killed by chemotherapy,” IIT-Delhi said in a statement.

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The team consists of two faculty members — Neetu Singh from the Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Shalini Gupta from the Department of Chemical Engineering — and their students Smita Patil and Rohini Singh

An all-women team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi has developed a new drug delivery platform, using nanoparticles, which they say will more effectively target bacterial infections, improving chances of recovery from cancer-related secondary infections.

The team consists of two faculty members — Neetu Singh from the Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Shalini Gupta from the Department of Chemical Engineering — and their students Smita Patil and Rohini Singh. The research was published last month in Scientific Reports journal.

“The nanotechnology-based delivery system would be specifically useful for cancer patients because if the bacterial infection in cancer remains untreated, it can infect the host even after the cancer cells are killed by chemotherapy,” the institute said in a statement.

Gupta said they had been working on developing the platform since the last one year. “We are focusing not on mammalian cells, but on bacteria which slip into the cancer cells. If you load antibiotic drugs on the nanoparticle, it makes its way through the bacteria even more…. In the next study, we want to do dual drug delivery so that we can kill bacterial infection as well as the cancer cells,” said Gupta.